Tonight, MM and I are going to dinner at Craftsteak with our NYC family – the couple that has fast become our closest relationship as a couple. We’ll call them R&A for now. It is R’s birthday today, and we always spend our birthdays together, if possible. Craftsteak is likely to make all of us happy because we like meat and fish, and we like to think of ourselves as talented and experienced connoisseurs of NYC dining and we have yet to share a dinner table at Colicchio’s masterpiece in the Meatpacking District.

Craftsteak is one of very few celebrity chef restaurants to originate in Las Vegas and then come to New York. Everything a Craftsteak is taking what exists at Craft and making it more glitzy and more loud – the dining room is four times larger and the ceiling is double the height than Craft’s. The bar is made of slate – and it looks more like a full-sized runway than a bar, which I better not share with some of my more adventurous girlfriends who much prefer to be ON the bar than at it. The wood tables are the same at both, only there are many more of them at Craftsteak. Everything works together to help in the consumption of big steak dinners.

The menu is printed every day, and it follows suit with everything else in its gigantic size. There is also a raw bar , which is new for Colicchio’s concept. There are several obsessive categories of steak – corn-fed beef aged four different ways, Hawaiian grass-fed, several pricey gradations of Wagyu. Even the pedigrees and the provenances of the steaks are so specific that may even want to ask what the cow’s sexual orientation was – to get the most lean and healthy diet. Delicious sweetbreads, a roasted lobster tail (which must be roasted in liquid gold when you consider the price, fava beans with crushed hazelnuts, and even duck foie gras add to the menu variety in an attempt to hit you over the head with appeal.

I’m excited for our dinner, but more excited about my company – hopefully we will be able to hear one another from across our enormous table in an enormous room over an enourmous steak.